Indigenous communities fear government store takeover

Leaders from a group of Aboriginal communities that have been suffering hunger and poor nutrition say they fear a government proposal to take over their stores.

They say the community-owned stores in South Australia's remote Arnangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands may have to increase food prices because they will be required to run at a profit instead of being subsidised.

At the moment, all but one of the stores in the region are run by the Mai Wiru - or Good Food - company, which is owned and supervised by a community council.

But Mai Wiru runs on a government subsidy of about $250,000 a year, and the Federal Government says it wants to make the stores more sustainable and able to run without subsidy.

The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, has ordered a review.

"We know that Mai Wiru does provide some support to some stories in the APY lands," she said.

"We have continued to support Mai Wiru, we are going to make sure we better understand the role that they play so there will be a review that we conduct with them over the next little while.

"What we want to do is make sure that they are stores that are providing food to people at the lowest possible cost and providing food of a wide and healthy range that's really our fundamental objective."

But many people in the community say they fear a takeover by the Government's own company, Outback Stores.

Loss of autonomy

Outback Stores runs at a profit, although the Government says any money made is pumped back into communities.

"Outback stores has a policy of only working with communities so they won't go anywhere that they're not welcome," Jenny Macklin said.

"I think they are a terrific organisation.

"They provide wonderful support for community stores in many parts of remote Australia but they go where they're invited."

But the general manager of Mai Wiru, Kirsten Grace, says the loss of a community-owned company would result in a lack of self determination.

"The issue really is that community members run Mai Wiru and they make decisions about what we do," she said.

"So they will actually give me direction as to what they would like to see happen in their stores and we then enact it."

Ms Grace says in the past the store has made decisions about products to help improve community health.

"We tend to make greater changes and much more health oriented," she said.

"A prime example would be the Amata store where they removed [several brands of soft drink] from the shelves."

"It's not banned from community but the community made a decision not to stock that product or those products within the store and that reduced the intake of sugar by 1.9 tonnes a year for a population of about 420 people."

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